Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864.

Since five of the seven chapters that follow Mary Poovey's Introduction recast essays she has previously published, it is no surprise that her ensemble has more associative than organic integrity. But the grounds of association are varied and compelling: a sustained focus on the first half of the Victorian period, principally the 1830s and 1840s, when an emergent "representational technology" (10) was setting the terms within which mass culture would later develop; a persistent delving beneath the epiphenomenal identity formations of gender, class, and race - obligatory though these categories have become in several strains of contemporary scholarship - to expose epistemological shifts at a more basic tectonic level; a program for producing history through literary analysis of the imagery and rhetoric of texts less often literary than bureaucratic or polemical; a rare combination of high research standards with exacting theoretical reflection. If the results sometimes have an abrupt way of surprising themselves into mutual relation, chapter by chapter, and if the comparative finesse of the new (presumably latest) chapters shows up some heuristic roughness in the rest, there is nevertheless work on every page here that commands respect.

The title trope of the "social body," which Poovey establishes in …